Reading Emily Dugan's piece in The Independent about the practice of "bridenapping" around the world it seems kind of important to note that, over and over and around the world from Somalia to Sarajevo, the mechanism that seems to make bride kidnapping work is the notion that once a woman is presumed to have been "taken," even against her will, she's too tainted, damaged, or unclean either for her family to take her back or for anyone else to agree to marry her.

What on the Great Blue Marble is that all about anyway!?!?! And all for the hypothetical value of a sliver of vestigial tissue in whole human beings who are entirely competent, capable and often even ( in Dugan's case from Kyrgyzstan) college educated and working!

Photo of NZ Police Minister Judith Collins via stuff.co.nz

New Zealand blogger Maia says the recent earthquake seems to be giving the local justice department head an opportunity to further indulge in rape culture and, by extension, homophobia.

From the [New Zealand] Herald: Police Minister Judith Collins said the actions of looters was akin to “people who rob the dead”. She expected to see the judiciary throw the book at looters.

“I hope they go to jail for a long time – with a cellmate.”

Judith Collins introduced widespread double-bunking; she championed it in the media. When people who had actually done research suggested that it would lead to more prison rape and violence, she shrugged those statements off.

And now she’s telling us that, for her, abuse and violence between inmates is a feature of double-bunking, not a bug. She is not explicit, but we live in a culture where threats of rape in prison are common enough that she doesn’t need to finish the thought by telling us that the cellmate is large and called Bubba. By signalling that she thinks looters should be subject to rape and violence from their cell mates, she has acknowledged that her policy of introducing cellmates is responsible for increased rape and violence.

Source: Alas, a blog

This is pretty cool.  I'm glad she brought it up.

Few things identify rape culture quite like the assumption that it will be the new, the young, the white, the middle-class, the petty-criminals, or the white-collar criminals who will become the victims of prison rape when inmates are “doubled up” unsupervised in cells.

Similarly, few things identify rape culture quite like the assumption that if assertions like Collins’s are true then the prison system rewards, encourages, coddles, or even tacitly recruits those who really are prison rapists by providing them with more victims.

And finally, few things identify rape culture quite like the general failure of progressives to push back on the previous two assumptions.

While rates of rape and sexual assault seem to be in decline in the general population, prison rape remains a huge reservoir not only of future perpetrators but of current ones! And of current victims. Thanks so much for bringing this up and for making the connection so clearly.

Couple other little assumptions in there

• That only prisoners sexually assault or rape prisoners
• That only male prisoners sexually assault or rape fellow prisoners
• That (dreadful as it sounds) rape and sexual assault is the worst thing that can happen to one in prison.
• That sex between prisoners is inevitably non-consensual, or that loneliness and isolation can never be so great that otherwise straight prisoners never seek or form intimate or sexual bonds with each other.

But the main thing is that New Zealand's senior police official thinks that "tough on crime" means incorporating prison rape into corrections policy rather than opposing or working to minimize it.  She's not alone.

Thomas of Yes Means Yes says that if you come home and find your door broken and your stereo missing you’ll generally immediately tell people your house had just been robbed.

From the standpoint of the law in most places it’s only robbery if your stereo is taken by force or threat of force during a face-to-face confrontation. When in fact if you weren’t home then technically you weren’t robbed at all.

You were burgled.

If someone broke into your house and stole all your shit while none of the occupants were home, in most places and for many reporting purposes, you got burgled. But you’ll say you got robbed, because that’s what people say. And if you say, “I got robbed,” if you actually got burgled, nobody will call you a liar. Because you’re not lying. You’re just using the word in its ordinary nontechnical sense.

Nobody says, “he was manslaughtered.” People say “murdered” all the time, but whether that’s how the charge will read depends on state laws with different definitions. We don’t cross-examine a man who says, “my son was murdered,” in case his son was actually manslaughtered. That would be not only silly but inhuman. The word has an ordinary meaning.

But as soon as you say “rape”, some asshole shows up arguing that you need the right legal definition, a conviction, a note from your doctor and a notarized affidavit from the county clerk.

It’s bullshit, and fuck that noise, and that’s all I have to say about it.

He said it here.

Earlier this morning I was reading an interview with Andrea Dworkin from 1992 and she made a point that I’m not going to get into directly but which first of all was hugely overlooked and second of all is entirely germane to the incredibly squirrely avoidance strategies you encounter when trying to talk directly about the problem of rape.

The upshot was that if you’re mired up to your ass in Rule #1 of the bogus Two Rules of Desire (“it is simultaneously inconceivable and intolerable for a woman to have sexual desire”) and Rule #2 (“it is simultaneously inconceivable and intolerable for a man to be sexually desired”) then you’re going to have it somewhere in the back of your mind that absent some form of guile, intoxication, or outright force straight men could never get laid. And so you’re going to be really, really defensive about it.

The trick, as Dworkin pointed out, is that she wasn’t the one saying men could never get laid. And in fact she wasn’t saying that at all. Instead it was her (male) interviewer who was saying it. And he pretty much was.

Dworkin was perfectly aware that women can very much enjoy sex in general and intercourse in particular. And if the joke hadn’t grown so old for her, and if the consequences weren’t so terrible, she might have been amused that her interviewer didn’t seem to get it.

Point being that, as I like to say over and over, anti-feminists hate men worse than anybody. And feminists definitely aren’t the ones most likely to believe all men are rapists!

Update: I mean… Sweet Mother of Pearl, what’s in it for you that makes it worth insisting that 99% of all rape accusations are false?

Well here’s an interesting tidbit on maintenance of the two-sphere model of gender that I stumbled across on a coffee-shop “library.” The book is called Unruly Women: The Politics of Social and Sexual Control in the Old South. In a coffee-shop setting I’ve only been able to read the introduction but the rest of the book looks interesting as well.

Here’s an eye-opening couple of paragraphs from the introduction though.

To link female honor to purity would have proven sexually inconvenient for southern white men, however, had they not bifurcated the sexuality of white and black women. The creation of Jezebel provided the rationale for allowing sexual relations between white men and black women. Southern proslavery ideologue William Harper made no apology for the sexual degrading of black women by white men. He simply extended his theory that “slavery anticipates the benefits of of civilization and retards the evils of civilization” into the realm of sexual relations.

By regarding black women as a “class of women who set little value on chastity,” he argued that slavery protected black women by saving them from the alternative of being cast out of society in the manner “justly and necessarily applied to promiscuous free women.”

Harper further argued that the sexual access to enslaved women discouraged white men from debauching “pure” white women and provided them with “easy gratification” for their “hot passions” without violating the code of southern honor. Finally, he reasoned, such sexual access made white men “less liable to those extraordinary fascinations, with which worthless [white] women sometimes entangle their victims.”

Source: Introduction, pg #9

What’s really boggling is that Harper, like Aquinas, Augustine, and countless others who’ve endorsed this view of heterosexuality imagined they could endorse this outlook and still go to Heaven when they died.

This would sound more shocking if virtually the same sentiments didn’t turn up in the Middle Ages and even earlier: a relatively small number of “jezebels:” prostitutes, slaves, and occasionally even boys are sacrificed at the alter of, well, unalterable male lust in order to… what? To preserve the nigh-unto-asexually disinterested sexual “purity” of “true womanhood.

One can only imagine how actual true women felt about it… all of them obviously — both the “bad,” “debauched,” or “fallen” ones were overborn sexually, and the “pure,” “true,” and “virtuous” who were allowed no sexual expression at all.

Anyway, it’s a totally horrifying but also very tidy encapsulation of the dominant paradigm of women as the obligatory no-sex class and men as the compulsive sex class.

Anyway, knowing nothing else about the book (though I’ll see if I can get back to the coffee shop to read more of it) the very quick skim I was able to give it looks like a seriously interesting look at a usually seriously overlooked population and the dynamics women of all social and economic classes were subject to before, during, and after the Civil War.

On the very off-hand chance anyone else has read more of it feel free to let me know what you think in comments.